With her face drained of color, Veronica pushed against Its shoulders with desperate strength. After wrestling free from beneath the creature, she swam frantically toward the rippling surface above. This time, It made no attempt to seize her legs. The blessed light grew closer.
Splashing violently as her face broke the surface, Veronica scrambled toward the shore. Never had she moved so swiftly through water. After nearly stumbling several times, she reached the lakeshore and spotted her fallen blade. With water-slicked hands, she drew the divine sword, aimed its gleaming point with quivering arms, and waited.
I’ll destroy it. I’ll eradicate this abomination completely.
Finally, It emerged with a violent cascade of water. The approaching figure dripped with liquid, raven hair clinging like seaweed to pale skin, its form entirely bare—having not a thread to cover its nakedness. And its face…
Veronica felt her resolve crumbling to dust.
Seeing her own visage outside the water, she couldn’t make herself raise her blade—her arm frozen as if bound by unseen chains. The creature approached, seemingly unafraid of the sword. If she pierced its heart, she would die as well. The horror of her mission crystallized in that terrible instant. Though she had journeyed here knowing death awaited, she was still consumed by mortal fear when faced with oblivion’s threshold. Her limbs trembled. Her spirit yearned to flee. The eternal darkness where sensation and thought would cease seemed a distant nightmare. In that moment of weakness, she longed for Leon’s steadying presence.
The moment that treacherous thought—I want to live—raised its head, Veronica found herself already retreating. Then she turned and fled into the darkness.
I’m such a coward! I’m so weak and pathetic!
Veronica, the Chosen One, had fled from her divine purpose.
Her footfalls echoed with haunting resonance through the pitch-black cavern, each step like the mournful cry of some nameless beast. Running blindly through the suffocating darkness, she plummeted suddenly as the ground gave way beneath her, tumbling helplessly over jagged surfaces.
Her limbs were scraped raw. After what seemed an eternity, Veronica finally stopped rolling and struggled to her feet, her lungs burning. At last, she found herself bathed in moonlight brighter than before. Everything surrounding her gleamed with an eerie whiteness. She must have emerged from the underground labyrinth.
Just then, something beneath her palm shattered with a sickening crunch.
Veronica looked down, and her blood turned to ice.
It was a human tooth.
“Oh…”
She scrambled backward in horror, but the pale hill where she sat was constructed entirely of human remains—a macabre landscape of bones stretching in every direction. Scattered throughout were tattered remnants of clothing and black insects crawling through empty eye sockets. Revulsion seized her heart. This was a place she had glimpsed before in her prophetic visions.
It was the Bahamut’s breeding ground—a mass grave of countless souls denied both cremation and proper burial.
In the distant shadows, crimson eyes glittered like malevolent stars against the void.
Veronica’s empty stomach convulsed repeatedly as bile rose in her throat. Pristine feet approached the puddle of gastric fluid seeping into the bone-strewn ground. She raised her head in a daze. It had silently approached her.
Veronica gazed up at the abomination wearing her face like a stolen mask. With unnatural deliberation, It parted its lips.
“Where… are you going?”
Veronica’s breath caught in her throat.
“You came… to find me.” The creature paused, then added, “You came… to embrace me. Your family.”
“What?”
“Because we’re family… I spared your life. Gifted you… the blade.”
The revelation struck her like a physical blow. Veronica lowered her trembling gaze to the sword clutched in her white-knuckled grip. The creature was talking about the moment after extracting God’s essence—when it had inexplicably allowed her to live. It had spared her because it believed they shared some fundamental connection.
But… family? It thought I came here to embrace it?
Her reeling mind desperately grappled with the creature’s logic. Though her body quaked, Veronica managed to shake her head in denial. Suddenly, with uncanny swiftness, it dropped to all fours, hands and knees pressed against the bone-covered ground, thrusting its face mere inches from hers. Veronica’s own terrified expression reflected back at her in those blood-red irises.
“Then what are you?” It asked.
Ice crawled down her spine at the sight of those unnaturally wide eyes. The creature neither blinked nor shifted its gaze, maintaining an inhuman stillness.
Frozen in place, Veronica summoned her courage and whispered, “What about you? What exactly are you?”
Though she'd asked the question without much thinking, it had been humanity’s biggest puzzle these past two years. The creature appeared momentarily perplexed, maintaining an eerie silence.
“I’m asking where you came from. What you truly are. ‘Bahamut’ is merely a name humans bestowed upon you.”
“From… where?”
It stood motionless for a heartbeat before tilting its head backward toward the cavern’s gaping ceiling. As its neck bent at an angle physically impossible for any human form, Veronica held her breath, awaiting its revelation.
“The heavens,” it finally answered.
“…The heavens?”
“Our world was up there. We were… better than you. In numbers. In advancement. But then… most of us died.”
Veronica was struck speechless by both the revelation and the voice delivering it. The creature’s tone was gradually transforming, as if learning through mimicry—growing more delicate, more hauntingly like her own.
“The superior children all perished. Because we were all the same, we got sick with the same disease too. Some of us were sent out to ensure survival. Seventeen cycles of your sun passed during our journey to this realm. In the ocean, we consumed the creatures of the sea. We transform according to what we eat, but the fish couldn’t get out of the water. After another year, we finally consumed a human who had fallen into the ocean.”
The cascade of revelations began aligning with the fragments Veronica had already known. The Bahamut had discovered Earth twenty years ago, crashed into the ocean disguised as a celestial body three years ago, and emerged onto land two years ago after consuming human flesh.
If their civilization had perished due to homogeneity, Veronica could understand why they would covet the diversity of creatures here. Yet that created a terrible contradiction.
Still reeling from shock, Veronica forced words through her parched lips when the creature fell silent.
“I… I can understand what you’re saying. But then, why mimic my form? If diversity was your goal, why are you copying my face and voice?”
Her trembling voice betrayed her primal fear. Though still awkward in its delivery, the creature now spoke with an uncanny reproduction of her own vocal patterns.
It was then that its inhuman neck slowly lowered, bringing its gaze level with hers.
“That day, there were all sorts of people standing in front of God—children, youths, elders, the weeping, the joyful, those running and crying out. But God chose you. A sleeping innocent within the womb.”
She realized that It was talking about the incident in the wilderness twenty years ago. The creature clearly believed that Veronica, selected from countless souls that day, possessed some divine quality. It sought to imitate her in hopes of receiving God’s favor for itself.
Veronica’s gaze wavered with dawning understanding.
“…No. That’s not why.”
“Not why?”
“The Divine didn’t choose me for my physical form or voice. As you said, surely there were all sorts of people present that day, including virtuous souls, wealthy merchants, impoverished beggars, dreamers, and nobles. But they all bore the stain of worldly corruption.”
“Worldly corruption?”
“Yes. ‘Sin’ is what we call it. The taint that is unavoidable once born into this realm.”
Veronica’s eyes gleamed with solemn revelation. This was the conclusion she had drawn when formulating her hypothesis about God’s presence within her.
“Only an unborn child possessed the purity and innocence necessary to serve as a worthy vessel for the Divine.”
The creature tilted its head in puzzlement. It clearly couldn’t fully comprehend her meaning. The atmosphere remained charged with an otherworldliness that raised the fine hairs along her skin.
Yes, humanity had fallen into corruption. Their sinfulness had reached an intolerable threshold in the Divine’s sight. Perhaps God hadn’t bestowed His essence upon the Bahamut out of compassion for the creature, but rather to cleanse this world of humanity’s festering corruption.
Indeed, the mighty city of Karta had fallen in the aftermath. Countless bastions of civilization had crumbled to dust. But what would come after the purge? What would become of the hound once it has hunted the rabbits to extinction?
Veronica knew the ending God had ordained. The realization filled her soul with a profound melancholy.
Throughout her sacred journey, she had imagined confronting the First Bahamut countless times, but never had she envisioned such a conversation.
It displayed an unexpected benevolence toward her, almost welcoming in its demeanor. Its unnatural expression resembled the excitement of a lonely child who had finally found companionship. She recognized these subtle cues because they played across her own features.
“For what it’s worth… I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Veronica remained human at her core. Though her flesh had been corrupted by the Bahamut’s essence, her spirit remained steadfastly aligned with humanity. That was precisely why God had chosen her as the instrument of the Bahamuts’ destruction and had blessed her with someone to love. Because, if nothing else, she would fulfill her divine purpose for Leon’s sake.
Veronica recalled God’s words in the Divine Text. Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
“The truth is, we aren’t family. I am not a Bahamut—I am human.”
With unwavering resolve, Veronica plunged the divine blade directly into Its heart. With a sickening sound of pierced flesh, the sensation of steel parting skin traveled to her hand as crimson lifeblood cascaded down the gleaming blade.
Its pupils dilated enormously, pulsing like a frantic heartbeat.